(Action Comics. #363. DC Comics. May 1968.) In the spring of 1968 Superman contracted “Virus X,” a disease cooked up by Lex Luthor in a prison laboratory. The #363 issue of DC’s Action Comics serial told a four-part story of a viral attack on the hero from planet Krypton. In the comic, the devious . . .
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While the storm dances outside, rats huddle in the shadows at the far end of the attic. Julie can barely make them out from where she sits, an old wooden-handled axe and a battery-operated lantern by her side, the gable window rattling in its frame above. Other shadows shuffle about down close . . .
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Review of Paper-Thin Skin by Aigherim Tazhi, translated by J. Kates. Zephyr Press, 2019 For a debut poetry collection, Aigerim Tazhi’s Paper-Thin Skin is a work of stunning originality. Part of what makes this work so compelling is the way that it grapples with the mystery involved in the creative process, namely the act of . . .
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What do we remember?I read about a woman who could recallthe womb, who described it as a shiny, mirroredsubstance, slick, the purplish hue of an eggplant.Another suspended in anti-gravity, shuffledalong in a premature moonwalk.—from “Birth,” Volume 61, Issue 1 (Spring 2020) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.My very . . .
Read MoreLate mornings in Spain are particularly grim during the COVID-19 confinement. That’s the time of the day when the entire nation listens to the daily broadcast of the COVID-19 press conference. One hour of densely packed updates: new death and infection counts, modeled predictions, new confinement measures, social initiatives. . . Every . . .
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(Photo: Nicoletta Dosio in Torino, March 30, 2020. La Stampa) March 31, 2020 My cousin Mario has told me about our Grandmother Emma’s memories of the so-called Spanish flu. Between 1918 and 1920, it killed tens of thousands of people across the world, a world that, at the time, had a total population . . .
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(Author Photo by Simon Sahner) Around the courthouse they’ve built orange and white barricades,directed traffic to side streets to reduce heads craning from car windows,and as I walk the dog this morning with Kate, she turns and asks, What do you think? and I say, Must be a protest. When my dad gavethe eulogy at my . . .
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The dress bound my bodylike a bandage staunching a wound.Lace choked my throat.My arms were cinched in tourniquets of tuelle. I was a hand grenade of a girlvacuum packed into a costume,my fingers poised in the fuselage of my lap.I’d chopped my hair short.—from “My First Grade Picture,” Volume 61, Issue 1 . . .
Read MoreI haven’t left my house since February, but now I’ll have to do it. I have to get to a bank machine. Yes, even in these dark times of COVID-19, we Italians still get fined by mail. I’ll pay up, but you should know that I happen to have a philosopher for . . .
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Modern society, as Byung Chul Han, incisively points out, is a “burnout society,” for it is driven and governed by the unequal structures of capitalism and its deep desire to immunize itself from others—races, cultures, nations—thus making a palpable distinction between the self and the other, the known and the unknown, the . . .
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